of bullying monster. Ruby Ridge and Waco brought this fantasy to life. Other people who conjured revenge fantasies after those events kept them in check, but McVeigh did not. Dr. Smith repeated something he had told Michel and Herbeck-that McVeigh, in describing his role in the bombing, "reminded me of a high- school student whose science project has been very successful." Oh, really? Why cotÙdn't he have just grown some fuzzy stuff in petri dishes, scrutinized the rings of Saturn, vivi- sected frogs? "He'd been depressed for a long time," he added, '4. an d this project gave him a focus and enabled him to relieve the depression. Most people are not ca- pable intellectually of putting the project together. You have to have someone who's motivated, who's fearless, who has the experience of being a warrior, and who views himself as a warrior." And if the death penalty is carried out? "I think it demeans the United States as a government to have a federal death- penalty law. For the most powerful de- mocracy in the world to rely on the death penalty to control its citizens is an indication of its weakness, not its strength. There's no one on death row who wotÙd have been deterred because of the death penalty: We don't need it here." I had been back in Terre Haute less than half an hour, once again under house arrest at the Holiday Inn, when Attorney General Ashcroft announced the one- month reprieve that McVeigh might or might not have desired. When he fin- Ished, I left the TV on, with the sound muted, and settled in. I had work to do and suspected that this would be a quiet place to get it done. A family crowd ma- terialized for the Mother's Day buffet downstairs, but by that evening, when all of Terre Haute was supposed to be eyebrow- deep in the pre-game festivities of the closest thing to a Super Bowl the town was ever likely to witness, I pretty much had the run of the joint. Some trauma- tized hotel operators, flooded with cancel- lations, announced that anyone reserving a room for the next round of the death- watch wotÙd have to put up a nonrefund- able deposit. Anti-federalist sentiment ran quite high at the Chamber of Commerce when the realization dawned that the new execution date conflicted with the state beauty pageant. The Miss Indiana Celeb- rity Miniature GolfToumament & Pizza ; C-- ,. _.-?- r:: :::.- , /Þ-t, /' /// ? Ii"; (15 l \ J I" // /f / {/ , II f ( 1/1 //H -- ( I i i , I ( I I ( W\ f;: CJ { .. / .. T . , --- , - - -- ,..- -------- ß t- 5 ht I { Lr "I'd invite you in, but I have a white couch." -- ---- ---- -=;:- L - -=- --- Partywas schedtÙed for the night before McVeigh's medical appointment. Some- one, by God, was going to pay for this. When I first arrived in town, I had driven out to look at the prison and im- mediately discovered the best candidate for the tide Local Merchant Destined to Be Interviewed Most Often. This was RaotÙ David, the friendly eponymous proprietor of David's Food Center, a small grocery store that specialized in the major weekend-food groups-meats, sliced cheeses, pickles, chips, salsa, beer-- and the most conspicuous business es- tablishment on State Road 63, right across the street from the pokey: The morning after the postponement, David's photo- graph turned up on the front page of the Indianapolis Star, alongwith a tough-luck account of how the perishable provisions he had stocked up on were going to restÙt in a three-thousand-dollar loss. Later that day; I went back to see him and was relieved to find him in a sanguine frame of mind. "It's not really that bad," he said. He'd bought a lot of pint containers of whole milk and chocolate milk, and he'd take a hit on those. Also, he'd invested heavily in sandwich rolls and some refrigerator products called Lunch Maker Bologna Fun Kit and Lunch Maker Turkey Fun Kit-fifteen cases' worth that he might have trouble moving. But the shish- kebab meat he'd been planning to grill for the hungry journalists and death- penalty debaters was still in the freezer, and the eighty cases of bottled water would last indefinitely: Memorial Day weekend was coming, his Budweiser dis- tributor had promised to send out a cou- ple of girls in bikinis who wotÙd serve beer in the parking lot, and that wotÙd boost his cash flow. One area of uncer- tainty was snack foods. He had a major oversupply of potato chips, nachos, pret- zels, cheese curls, and the like, some with expiration dates in September and some in late June. If McVeigh's attorneys de- cided to seek anothér delay-well, who knew? Another death-row inmate, a drug dealer and murderer named Juan RatÙ Garza, is now schedtÙed for lethal injec- tion eight days after McVeigh. ShotÙd Garza somehow get the juice first, that will attract a certain amount of interest, but nothing of shish-kebab proportions. It's McVeigh's expiration date, God bless America, that matters, for all the right reasons and all the wrong ones. .